Current statistics are in and, as of the end of the third quarter of 2017, Facebook now has 2.07 billion users across the globe. Further, this number has been on a steady incline since the inception of this social media platform, increasing by a full one billion users in the last five years alone.
This means that, if you own a small business, using Facebook in 2018 can really help you grow. But how do you use it in a way that makes your company bigger and stronger without taking up too much of your already limited time?
The key is to know which tactics can enhance your potential results. Here are a few to consider implementing in the year ahead.Know Your Desired Goals
When you start a business, one of the first things experts recommend that you do is create a mission and vision statement. Why? Because the most successful companies know who and what they are, but they also know where they want to go. Well, the same is true when it comes to using Facebook to help you grow your business.
Facebook ads are a great tool for this, but it’s absolutely important to know exactly what you want your ads to do, their desired goals, so you’re more likely to achieve them. Some of the most common goals for Facebook ads include driving traffic to your site, selling a specific product or service, or even to simply raise awareness that your brand exists. Once you designate this goal, it becomes easier to create an ad campaign that does just that.
Optimise Your Facebook Ads
Many small business owners are currently using Facebook ads to help them better promote their various products and services. However, some ads perform at higher levels whereas others fall flat. What can you do so your business’s ads fall into the former group and not the latter?
For starters, you want to choose the best audience possible for the ad you’ve taken the time to create. Part of this involves selecting the right demographics (age range, geographic location, etc.) for your ad, but if you really want to create a Facebook ad that increases sales, it also means paying attention to the size of the audience you plan to target.
For improved results, you really want to aim for an audience size that is somewhere between 250k and 500k for the best results. This is fairly easy to do if you’re targeting a large geographical region (like the entire UK or US) or a highly populated area (cities versus more rural areas).
That being said, if your audience isn’t that large, instead of focusing on size, you can still get a solid ad response by making ad optimization your priority. For instance, if your audience is smaller than 10k, a ‘Daily Unique Reach’ optimization option should work best. And if it’s larger than that but smaller than 200k, then you’ll want to optimize your ad for impressions.
Keep Track of Your Results
Advertising on Facebook is no different than any other type of advertising—newspaper, billboards, and flyers, for instance—in that you want to keep track of your results so you know whether the ad is generating the response you want. If you don’t monitor these types of metrics, you may be wasting your time and money without even realizing it.
The great thing about this tactic is that Facebook makes tracking your results easier than ever to do, even for business owners who are new to the world of Facebook advertising. If this is you, one of the best Facebook tactics for beginners is to go to your Facebook Ad Reports and check ‘Performance & Clicks’ under the Performance tab. This will show you exactly how your ad is doing.
If you access this information and your click-through rate is one percent or higher, your ad is working fairly well. Anything lower than that and you may want to make adjustments.
Facebook is a great social media platform for helping small businesses grow. As long as you know your desired goals, optimize your ads, and keep track of your results, you’ll be on your way to creating a stronger and bigger business in 2018. That’s a great thought, isn’t it?
